International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

58 THE CINEMA IN TEACHING To take children once in a while to see an instructional film will certainly cause no great harm, but to base all scholastic teaching on the cinema, as some people would like to do, means nothing else but returning to the old systems which counted upon the physical immobility and mental passivity of the scholar. 4. The Cinema and As we can see, the two Hurry. fundamental objections that can be raised against the efficacy of the cinema as an instructional and educational means are simple but serious. I will repeat what I have said : a film shown in school to the children once in a way is all right. But if by the instructional and educational cinema we are to understand a special kind of cinema to be introduced regularly into the school for the use of the children as the most efficacious means of education and teaching, then I am a total sceptic as to results. We all know the curious phenomenon in virtue of which even the best things suffer in that as soon a? they are introduced into the school, they immediately become boring and wearying. What is boring is quite non-educational. The humble blackboard where teacher and pupil design the desired figures with their own hands is sufficient in the majority of cases. It answers the requirements of being easily available and requiring some effort, which is not the case with the cinema. Hand and eye must be used together and gain practice in this way. It accustoms the vast aspirations of a human being — always by nature a magalomaniac — to be content with little, which is one the best things one can learn of life. I do not look forward with any pleasure to see it substituted, out of a crazy love of modernity, by a means which is technically superior, but morally much inferior. In other cases, the fixed projection, the magic lantern of our youth, with or without those colours which the cinema has not yet given us, is more useful than the film. In teaching the history of art, for instance, the fixed image, instead of being tiring, holds the attention better, assists the memory, while the moving picture does neither. Even a simple drawing, a well made design, the photograph in a book are often enough better than the cinema for supplying that indirect intuition of things which it is hard or impossible to obtain directly. The drawing and the photograph are there on the page, with their characters, which are always the same, fixed in a settled attitude, at all times and seasons. We look at them time after time weaving our fancies round them, so that eventually they become as familiar to us as the persons of our household. What did they do before ? What will they do in the future ? Count Cavour who looks at us in a thoughtful way through his glasses is not only the able diplomat of the Crimean war, but is some one who asks us each morning as we open the book of history : " Well, have you finally made up your mind to go over that lesson ? " Thus in front of a simple illustrated page of a book the child's mind is led bit by bit to dream and reflection. This is alas ! not the case in the cinema, where everything is fleeting and nothing lasts. Here every impression is the passing impression of a moment, a typical expression, if you like, of our century, where speed is a fundamental canon, and the breathless rapiddity of actions disguises superficialty, precariousness and the rush of all feeling and thought. 5. Instructional and For me, the most ser Anti-educational jous worries of the Cinema. educationist in the matter of the cinema are to be found outside the school rather than inside. There is no need to create the instructional cinema, for it already exists. The kind of cinema which some people would like to make especially so as to introduce it into scholastic buildings could not be other than a copy, an unsuccessful imitation, almost a